AMANDA DEDIE
Assistant News Editor
Remember high school homecoming week? When every day had themes, and everyone competed to have the sexiest costume while still following school dress code? Party City ran out of face paint long before Halloween because… spirit week.
People lost their minds over the homecoming game. People would go to the homecoming game, despite the fact that they had no friends or significant other on the team and no knowledge of the game whatsoever, just to support their school and see their classmates crush the opposing team. The air would buzz with excitement as a player made his way toward the end goal and cheerleaders bounced away on the sidelines, spelling out the name of the mascot.
This was the atmosphere in the Multi-Purpose Room on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 9:30 p.m., as over 100 students gathered to watch fellow Fredonian Steve Moses, a music and audio engineering major, compete against two other houseguests in the finale for the grand prize of $500,000.
In the MPR, Fredonia’s PR team was tossing around hats and t-shirts and hanging up signs cheering on Moses and #trombonists. Fredonians cheered every time he won a point in the Head of Household part 3 competition. One could feel the anticipation as everyone held their breath and either literally or figuratively held the hands of the people on either side of them, waiting with baited breath for the tiebreaker that would determine Steve’s fate in the Big Brother house.
“I think what I liked most was the variety of people who came out for the show,” said Mike Barone, Fredonia’s marketing and communications director via email. “Some of them didn’t even know Steve. Others had never seen ‘Big Brother.’ Still, they all showed up because it was such a proud moment for Fredonia. The School of Music showed up ‘big-time’ as well, with everyone from Band Director Paula Holcomb and his fellow trombonists to the Mason Hall cleaners on hand, bursting with anticipation. And then when he won? What a rush!”
Fredonia is the kind of school where hundreds of students are cheering on a student who made it to the final two on a reality TV show. Everyone may not know the student. They may not have even heard of him until the news broke, back at the beginning of summer, that a Fredonia student from Gouverneur, N.Y. was going to be in the Big Brother house.
Why does this matter? Dakota Pramesa, a sophomore majoring in biochemistry and computer information systems, said, “The fact that so many people got together to cheer on Steve is amazing. I don’t know how many people there actually know him personally, but you really felt a sense of togetherness, pride and community when you were in that room. These are the kind of people I want to surround myself with — people who come to cheer someone on not because he knows you but because he’s one of you. He’s a Blue Devil, just like the rest of us, and that’s why we were all there.”
While President Horvath was on the road during the finale, she went as far as pulling over somewhere to look for the results online and to see everyone’s reactions.
“People are proud that someone they know (or who goes to the same university, even if they don’t know him) won this event,” said Horvath via email. “People loved that he wore Fredonia shirts on the show. I read interesting debates about his strategy and how he compared to others on the show. There were snarky comments … as there are about everything. But most of what I read was that people were excited and proud.”
As for Moses’ reaction upon winning? After leaving the house to the cheers of the audience and learning of the support he had from his hometown and Fredonia, Moses said, via phone, “It’s absolutely incredible, because when you’re in there, you’re completely sequestered, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on on the outside.
“So you have no idea how people are reacting, and you have a lot of downtime because you have no entertainment, so you spend a lot of time worrying about what people outside the house are thinking and reacting, and it’s such a relief to come out to the positive response everyone has had. It’s so nice to see that there was a positive response; I never would have guessed.”